Blog story

E-safety Support Celebrates 3rd Birthday

E-safety Support launched in February 2013, shortly after Ofsted released the new requirements for e-safety in schools. Since launch we have added over 100 resources, send over 150 e-safety news bulletins and been joined by almost 11,000 members.

The most significant development since we launched has been the addition of 7 online training courses. These have been tailor made to reach the whole school community, and have been created specifically for pupils, staff, parents and governors. We are delighted to report that these courses have been issued to over 52,000 candidates - a number which is growing rapidly on daily basis.

Over the last 3 years, the online safety environment has seen many changes, both good and bad. We have seen the phenomenon of online trends making headlines for all the wrong reasons with Neknominate, Slenderman and various risky (and unfortunately sometimes fatal) challenges all playing out on social media. But there have also been positive trends too, with the ice bucket challenge for example which used the platform to raise millions of pounds for charity.

More safeguards for young people have also been made available - the big 4 media providers making changes to their parental controls to help protect children in the home and the RDI rolling-out their Friendly WiFi scheme to help protect them when in public places to name just two.

Of course, we must mention the most recent issue of young people being groomed online into extremism. This has been an incredibly challenging issue for many teachers and schools to tackle - we will continue to monitor this area particularly to ensure that we are providing appropriate resources to help support our members.

We are, of course, delighted to have so many members benefiting from the resources available at www.e-safetysupport.com, some of the comments we have received can be seen on our testimonials page - if you would like to let us know your thoughts, please email feedback@e-safetysupport.com or use the comments section below.

Over the coming months, we are looking forward to bringing you a new look to the website along with more e-safety resources. Will continue to monitor the e-safety issues to ensure we are keeping you up-to-speed with the important issues.

Finally, below is an infographic showing the E-safety Support story so far, highlighting the important developments across the site in the first 3 years - we look forward to continuing our journey with you.